After a year of investigation, the Justice Department’s letter arrived at 333 Cedar Street in New Haven, the address of the Yale School of Medicine for more than 200 years. It contained the kind of charge that has defined institutions for a generation: that the admissions office had actively researched ways to circumvent the Supreme Court’s explicit ban on racial consideration by using so-called “racial proxies.” Not by accident. Not carelessly. The DOJ’s Civil Rights Division claims that this was done on purpose. This was meant to be resolved by the 2023 Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions…
Author: Kelsey Myers
Hundreds of students in Pennsylvania do not currently have a school to attend. They do not attend the public school in their community. They don’t have a cyber charter. The moment Commonwealth Charter Academy filed a lawsuit in Commonwealth Court challenging a new state law that prevents students with chronic absenteeism from transferring to online programs, a legal and bureaucratic gap opened, trapping them in the middle. The legal process is underway. The pupils are holding out. The law at the heart of this controversy is not nuanced. Acts 44 and 47 of 2025 drew a clear line: unless a…
In Hyattsville, Maryland, the 7-Eleven on Sheriff Road is located in a strip that most drivers pass without giving it much thought. Convenience stores like this one along suburban corridors exist on the periphery of everyday life, serving as a place to stop before a shift, run a quick errand in between commitments, cash in on a little victory, and, if the mood strikes, purchase an additional ticket. Maurice Williams made the same stop there on a Tuesday morning in early May. He was a 59-year-old Washington, D.C. school bus driver who had an errand to run before work. He…
The images depicted what initially appeared to be a piece of furniture: a wooden box with a padded interior and a door that could be closed. The community surrounding the Salmon River Central School District, located in the small upstate New York town of Fort Covington near the Canadian border, was attempting to comprehend what it was looking at and what it meant for the children who had been inside it within hours of it appearing on Facebook in mid-December 2025. Parent and Akwesasne Mohawk tribal community member Sarah Konwahahawi Herne characterized her response as instantaneous and bodily. She sobbed.…
Like so many of these incidents, it began with something commonplace. Somewhere between the 215 Beltway and Deer Springs Way, in the 7000 block of North 5th Street in North Las Vegas, a man was seen acting strangely and concealing goods inside a business. Officers reacted. The man bolted. A few minutes later, students were seated in their classrooms when gunfire broke out on the Legacy High School campus. On the morning of May 14, the sequence proceeded quickly. When North Las Vegas police arrived at the establishment, the suspect ran away on foot and pointed a gun at the…
The Northumbria University campus buildings are difficult to miss when strolling through Newcastle’s city centre on a weekday afternoon. Students move between the Sutherland Building and the CCE2 block with the deliberate drift that defines a campus that occupies significant urban space, and modern facades press against older stone. The university has expanded into the city in ways that are more akin to a sense of community than to growth. It never made it to Newcastle. It has existed since 1877 under a variety of names and forms. Because Northumbria became a university in 1992 as part of the wave…
“tenYearMission” and “betterLateThanNever” were among the hashtags that surrounded Spencer Pratt’s graduation selfie, which he shared on Instagram in May 2014 while sporting a cap and gown. The majority of those who saw it chuckled. Somehow, the man who had spent years playing The Hills’ designated villain—rapping under the moniker “Great White,” causing trouble with Lauren Conrad, and leaving a reality show in Costa Rica after being arrested at the airport with hunting weapons—had earned a degree in political science from the University of Southern California. As expected, the majority of the response was incredulity. That degree is much less…
The conversation has changed when you walk into the financial aid office of nearly every graduate school in the United States this spring. Students who enrolled under one set of presumptions a year ago are now attempting to understand the implications of July 1 for their remaining semesters. They consistently return to $20,500, which is the new annual federal borrowing cap for the majority of graduate students. This amount necessitates some difficult math for programs in large cities where rent alone can exceed $2,000 per month. The amount that parents of undergraduates and graduate students can borrow through federal programs…
Residents of a market town in Northamptonshire, about 100 miles north of Windsor Castle, are secretly hoping for news that would change the town’s character over the coming years. Since 1556, Oundle School’s buildings—which one education guide described as having a “Jane Austen-style architecture without the accompanying floppy-haired entitlement”—have existed in a variety of configurations. They might become the future King of England’s secondary school this summer. Prince George, a 12-year-old who is finishing his last term at Lambrook School in Berkshire, is getting close to a moment that appears normal from a distance but isn’t. After completing prep school,…
A second-year psychiatry resident is currently making decisions about their future somewhere in a hospital hallway, with the total amount of their medical school debt looming in the background of their thoughts. That amount is significantly more than $200,000 for many doctors who will complete their residency in 2026. It sounds like something that happens to other people to be able to clear even a sizable portion of it while still in training without having to deal with taxable income. On the contrary, the VA Specialty Education Loan Repayment Program says otherwise. The Specialty Education Loan Repayment Program, or SELRP,…
